


Protein

by BabylonsFall



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Anxiety, Character Study, Danny-centric, Episode: s05e17 Kuka'awale (Stakeout), Gen, Insomnia, possibly pre-slash if you squint real hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 05:50:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17319170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabylonsFall/pseuds/BabylonsFall
Summary: It's something Danny's always dealt with. Not something to be fixed, but something to live with, work around, make plans for. And, maybe occasionally, talk about.(Not too much of course.)





	Protein

**Author's Note:**

> So uh. This is my first H50 fic. And I'm only on season 5 episode 18 (though I'm well aware of basically all spoilers for the show). So, take that as you will.
> 
> But I've enjoyed figuring out Danny's character since I started this damn show, and episode 17 just...I had to write something about it. And that's this.
> 
> _edit: ...added a summary 'cause somehow I forgot that..._
> 
> Hope you like it!

He’d like to say the...the insomnia was…

A reaction. He’d like to say there was a specific starting point, something he could point to on a timeline and say _there, that’s where I started slowly losing my goddamn mind._

But he can’t.

It’s a thing. It’s always been a _thing_.

He remembers being eight, and staring up at the ceiling. Listening to Matty in the bed across the room shuffle and kick. He remembers staring so hard into the dark he could make shapes out of the shadows. Remembers his eyes being full of pins and needles and his chest full of rocks not being able to do anything about it.

He also remembers telling his mom about it. About how his parents got worried, but not _too_ worried—no doubt shaking it off as something kids just did, and they’d deal with it if it got worse.

He doesn’t remember it getting worse. But he does remember it continuing. Every couple of months, he’d hit a week, a month, three where he just. Couldn’t sleep.

High school...high school, it got worse.

He’d always been a ball of nervous energy. A live-wire struck through with too many bleeds, but nowhere to go. Eventually, that live wire turned inward. Sank into his gut and his chest. Took the air out of his lungs, made it hard to see and hard to act. The guidance counselor called it anxiety, something totally normal for a kid his age. Possibly a good helping of clinical depression on top of it, but he couldn’t be sure. _And it was too early to tell anyway. All you teenagers, you all act the same. Who’s to say anymore?_

That live wire ate at his insides, turned sharp and hot every time something around him hiccuped or stumbled. It hurt.

Anticipating the hurt helped. A little. Enough that at seventeen, insides all torn up, fraying at the edges over something he couldn’t control, couldn’t stop, he clung to any little thing.

Figure out the hurt. Figure out which side it’s going to come from, and how it’s going to hit.

Hit it first, if he could. Bolt away, away, away, if he couldn’t.

By that point, he’d been a year without an episode. A year of nights of sleeping heavy, sleeping fine. As fine as a kid with electricity under his skin could anyway.

And then he found himself staring up at the ceiling, watching twisting shadows bleed into the false-sparkle of lighter grey, only to twist back down into inky black. Found himself sitting up in bed to see the window because the shapes in the corners were starting to make his chest hurt even as the walls seemed to bend towards him. Found himself rubbing at his eyes so hard he could pretend the ache in them was from his own hands and not the effort from keeping them shut when they didn’t want to be.

He could hear the house around him—his mom, still pottering around the kitchen, probably to get a glass of water. The sound of a window opening so, so slowly, and he knew Matty would probably look how he himself was going to feel in the morning. The creak and groans of a house filled to the brim with people for too many years.

By the fourth day, after three nights of stillness that made his blood boil and sounds pushed too loud by silence, he wanted to scream. Wanted to cry. Wanted to run the fuck away from everything else going on, going wrong. And if Tommy from shop class had just kept his voice down a little, maybe he wouldn’t be sitting in the nurse’s right now, and Danny wouldn’t be slumped outside the principal’s office.

* * *

So yeah. It’s a thing. A thing he’s always had to deal with, along with the anxiety, and the anger, and the whole mess that came with being Danny Williams.

By the time he graduates the academy, he’s got a system in place.

And, if you ask him, it’s a damn good one. Because he can’t be out on the streets, shaky and tired and trigger happy. He knows, far more than anyone may realize, just how dangerous he could be if he let this thing get ahold of him.

So he doesn’t.

Danny can never predict when it’s going to hit him, or for how long. But when it does…

He splurges on coffee, no matter how shitty of an apartment he’s got, or what bills are piling up. Caffeine gives him headaches for days, at first, but he gets used to it, because he has too. And if he can pass off the jitteriness on it, so much the better.

He figures out the ebb and flow of paperwork. Figures out how much to set aside in the hope that he’ll fall asleep at his desk, just for a little while, because something is better than nothing, and everyone else laughs when they find him with stacks of papers instead of asking if he’s okay when they find him curled up in the corner of the locker room.

He works out how to keep himself up straight when all he wants to do is collapse. It’s all about keeping himself moving. Talking. Ranting. Anger’s a good substitute for the full spectrum of human emotion if he plays it right—by the time he’s figured it out, everyone knows to ignore him when he rants.

He learns that infomercials may not put him to sleep, but they do wash over him in a wave of white noise that gets tantalizingly close, and yeah, maybe he knows a little too much about the latest innovations in cookware, or who has the best deals on gold right now, but it’s something, and he’ll take it.

Grace is a godsend, if he’s being honest. Woman’s an adrenaline junkie, right up there with the worst of the lot, and the way she takes turns—in his car—can sometimes be better than an espresso shot.

And the way she looks at him sideways, sometimes, he’s pretty sure she damn well knows it. But bless her, she keeps her mouth shut, and rounds the next corner just a little too tight.

(His therapist at the time tells him not to be surprised when his insomnia gets worse, after stressful events. And he wishes to God or whoever the hell is listening that he could go back in time and smack his fool head for the way he tells her _lady, my whole life is a stressful experience_. There’s a lot of wishing of course, in those weeks following. And not all for something so, so trivial, while he’s sitting out on the fire escape watching the city go by against a backdrop of muddy stars and neon, so he doesn’t wake up Rachel. His eyes are aching, his body one giant raw nerve that hurts when he breathes, and he just wishes. But then a car horn shatters the white-noise and he’s reminded that wishing doesn’t do shit.)

* * *

Moving to Hawaii is...well, it’s a nightmare.

For lots of reasons.

Many of which, McGarrett learns of. Very quickly, very loudly.

But Danny...Danny doesn’t really feel the need to share that piece that made it that much worse.

At the time it was because they weren’t really close. And by the time the bitching and the ranting died down and all that was left was good natured teasing, it didn’t feel right to throw that monkey wrench into it. Because he knew how McGarrett would take it. It’d be something he’d have to fix—always, always something to fix, not something to just let be because some things you live with and some things you try not to drown under, and Danny finds it funny in a dark, not actually all that funny kind of way, that McGarrett of all people can’t seem to shake the urge to fix others when he is the very definition of grin and fucking bear it. But that’s beside the point. Honestly.

So, Danny doesn’t tell him.

Doesn’t tell him that he kind of liked the shit hole apartment because it was easier to blame the lack of sleep on the thin walls and the paranoia.

Doesn’t tell him that he really, really doesn’t actually mind the paperwork he takes on, even if it makes Chin look at him sideways.

(And he knows Chin’s figured out part of his system. Just like he also knows that man will never let it slip. And after five years, he knows he owes him.)

Doesn’t tell him that the infomercials weren’t just to drown out the noise of the waves.

(Though, he does have to have a look at that himself, since that kind of white noise is normally perfect for helping him doze during a bad spell. And then the ugly shards of electricity in his stomach remind him that the waves are a perfect example of all that’s wrong with his life in that moment and he doesn’t want to think about it any more. Infomercials don’t really change, state to state. If he closes his eyes real hard and listens to some schmuck being too excited about cooking knives, he can almost hear the Jersey traffic behind it too.)

Doesn’t tell him that the reason he was so hot-headed in the beginning, so quick to yell and hit and rant, was because the good weeks were where he was getting two full nights of sleep. And they were few and far between, typically reserved for when he could hear Gracie, breathing softly, breathing fine, deep in her own dreams and so much more comfortable on the island than he was pretty sure he’d ever be.

* * *

It slips out, while they’re watching Emma.

He doesn’t mean anything by it, certainly isn’t trying to draw attention to it—come on, he lived in Steve’s house for chrissake and didn’t let it slip, not really—but it...falls out anyway.

He has insomnia. It’s a thing.

And Steve...doesn’t say anything about it. And the breath Danny’s holding, waiting for him to spring into action—to do what he doesn’t know, but then, it’s Steve. He can hazard a guess, but about personal shit, he never knows what rail the man’s going to go off of—gets released, bit by bit.

And then the man has to bring up protein.

About how the body needs it, and about how if he’s not sleeping he needs even more.

And he’d swear on Gracie’s barbie collection that that doesn’t make him want to smile. Doesn’t make him want to laugh—with relief or gratitude, he doesn’t know either.

Because it’s such a goddamn Steve thing to do.

And he can see the next couple of weeks unfolding in front of him. Can see the plan forming in Steve’s eyes.

And the dread he’d thought would be there—that this would have to be something where he wrestled Steve into sitting down and paying attention because this is not something you fix, dammit, and maybe it’d take a couple times to beat it into that thick skull of his, but he’d get it eventually. Maybe.

The dread’s not there. Because he realizes two things, in that span of a breath where he’s trying to decide if he wants to even dignify the idea of microwaved eggs as food. One, food’s not fixing. His mom may disagree, and he’s pretty sure his grandmother just rolled over in her grave, but it’s not. It’s helping. Different intent, different result, different impulse for the live wire under his skin to latch onto. And two? _Guardian types are confident, dependable, loyal._ This was never something Steve was going to let slide.

So, he decides, despite the electricity crackling under his skin, and despite the echo of hurt in his chest, to let it unfold how it will. Go with the flow.

Continue pestering the shit out of Steve about the damn workbook instead.

"It asked me to list something you were very passionate about."

"Oh, yeah? What’d you write?"

"Protein."

"Excuse me?"

"Protein."

"Protein? Well, you really uh, peered into my soul."

And if Danny’s grinning down in the pages, because damn right he did, well. Steve’s too busy actually opening up a bit—finally—to notice anyway. One revelation at a time.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Kudos and comments are always loved and appreciated!
> 
> Come yell about H50 (or other shows too) with me on [tumblr](https://distinctivelibrarians.tumblr.com/)?


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